The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has adopted a set of standards for wireless local area networks (WLANs), known as 802.11, as well a set of standards for wireless metropolitan area networks (WMANs), known as 802.16. Wireless products satisfying the 802.11 and 802.16 standards are currently on the market, for example. The term, WiFi, is used herein to describe equipment satisfying the 802.11 standard. The term, WiMAX, short for worldwide interoperability for microwave access, is used herein to describe equipment satisfying the 802.16 standard. Another technology standard, Bluetooth, is a wireless standard for wireless personal area networks (WPAN) developed by the Bluetooth special interest group (SIG), an industry association of electronics manufacturers.
Increasingly, computing or communication devices, such as laptop computers, handheld devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), cellular telephones, etc., are being equipped with multiple radios. These multiple radio devices, or MRDs, may simultaneously include Bluetooth, WiFi, and WiMAX radios, for example. The wireless spectrum has been carefully allocated to the different wireless technologies to avoid overlap and prevent interference between the different technologies. Nevertheless, simultaneous operation of multiple radios collocated on the same physical device is challenging, given the small form-factor and limited isolation (<25 dB) of the MRDs. Also, the MRDs continue to decrease in size, while the number of radios integrated within them keeps increasing.
Further, with the MRD, the radios may share components. For example, each radio device may share a radio frequency (RF) front-end and antenna, which may be expected to reduce the overall cost and size of the MRD.
When the radio devices are simultaneously in operation, interference or hardware resource conflicts may occur. To resolve this problem, some MRDs utilize interleaving radio activities (transmission or reception) in the time domain. FIG. 1 illustrates how a WiMAX radio may coexist with a WiFi radio in an MRD, by time-sharing the radio operations of each device, according to the prior art. The WiMAX radio receives data, followed by the WiFi radio transmitting data, followed by the WiMAX radio receiving more data, followed by the WiFi radio receiving data, finally followed by the WiMAX radio transmitting data. As FIG. 1 demonstrates, there is no overlapping of operations between the WiMAX operations and the WiFi operations. Instead, each operation of one radio is interleaved with the operation of the other radio. While this interleaving solves the interference and hardware resource conflict issues of the MRD, it is slower than is desirable.
Thus, there is a continuing need for a method by which the above shortcomings of the prior art may be overcome.